Sublime

He popped the team with the reins and rode out of town, thinking how young the boys were. Age had never mattered to him much. He felt that, if anything, he himself had gained in ability as the years went by. Yet he became a little wistful, thinking of the boys. However he might best them, he could never stand again where they stood, ready to go

“The next day I went back to the beach. It was surrounded by snowcapped peaks, and it was just unbelievably beautiful. There were bald eagles hunting fish. The bay was blood red from a killer whale hunting a humpback whale calf. And then a bear came out of the forest. I aimed and paused,” he said as we passed a rocky creek. “Then I shot. The bear

The way he looked. Eyes raised up, body tethered by one long thread to the big stormy sky, the whole of him up there with his words, talking to whoever was listening. I’ve not seen a sight to match it. No bones of his had ever been shoved in a feed bag. The man was a giant.

To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs.

Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.

For his evening reading he stuffed into his briefcase a narrative by an old hunter in the Southwest who had fought Apaches.